Aristotle knew a thing or two about moral theory, so he would probably have aced the ethics module on the Bar professional training course. Modern Bar students, though, are having a more difficult time with the exam.
Last July, hundreds sitting the BPP University Law School version went down in flames: more than half of 409 sitting the battery farm-like ethics exam failed the short-answer question and so automatically failed. Nor are they the only unlucky crop: Bar regulator figures show a steady fall in the first-sit pass rate, begging the question: why are prospective barristers so rubbish at knowing right from wrong?
First, what do the figures show? According to the Bar Standards Board, not so long ago — in the 2011-12 academic year — 85 per cent of students passed the ethics section of the BPTC exam first time. But the subsequent four years have seen a crash in the pass rate. The year before last, the figure slid to 65.5 per cent and last year it tumbled farther to 57 per cent. Legal academics anticipate that next year’s figure for the wider student body could mirror the BPP experience, with the first-time pass rate dropping to below half.
It would not be fair to single out BPP. The regulator’s research shows that an ethics malaise has spread across the institutions providing the Bar course. Of the eight providers who do so from 11 outposts in England and Wales, more than half saw a drop in the ethics module pass rate.
Tactfully, the BSB’s central examinations board does not name and shame individual institutions with tumbling ethics pass rates. And ethics is by no means the only module flummoxing prospective barristers. The report showed the pass-rate on the criminal litigation module plummeting by nearly 30 per cent last year at one unnamed institution.
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But problems over ethics are arguably the most worrying. Many anonymous students have complained in online chat forums that the BPP ethics exam paper was confusingly written this year. Others in legal academia and regulation point out that last year was the first time the exam was based on the Bar’s updated ethics handbook. “Students don’t just suddenly get worse,” says Sarah Hutchinson, a former University of Law director and who now heads Barbri, a prep course for UK students sitting the New York bar exam.
“The problem is communication. The BSB and the providers are not good at talking to each other when there is a change to the exam. Whenever that happens, the first cohort of students always gets walloped.” Understandably, the institutions themselves are keeping heads down, with academics reluctant to comment on the falling pass-rates. Likewise, the Bar Council has stayed quiet, preferring the BSB to deal with the issue. And officially the regulator plays with a very straight bat, saying only that “the first-sit 2015 BPTC exams were set, marked and moderated in accordance with the rigour needed to ensure students have the required knowledge and understanding to be a competent barrister”.
Meanwhile, there is hope that students are not losing their ethical touchstone entirely: our survey finds that they rate the most important quality of a lawyer to be . . . integrity.